number one, I emerge from the darkness like a spaceship. I start with terror and then relief. The gates at my entrance have water spouts that are small gargoyles. I am a thing among things, and out of context.

number two, I am a line, a flat surface, I am an atmosphere of surfaces. I take on light and give out light. Light is contained within me, I give light to you. You only see between me.

Why a landscape


The landscapes of my work form the passing impressions so similar to the figurative backgrounds that Zummer alludes to in describing ‘architectural projections’ [1]. They (both the natural landscapes and the digital architectural plains of the city) “operate in the marginal space of peripheral vision, as something almost already past, its import lying in having been, in enframing rather than engaging.” [2]

The buildings provide the necessary frame [3] for our compulsion to reside in image-spaces. Within a city, unconsciously, the four sides of a screen/photograph are perpetuated; in the reflections in windows, in signs, in advertising in scrolling textual forms. In the same sense, the trees and flowers and leaves and ground provide a psychological frame, a reflective agent so familiar to an individual, so utterly everyday as to not even be registered as individual elements.

In a way both the physical grounding in the city’s image-space and the memory-spurned movement into the languid fresh plant matter of the photograph speak of the idea of this has been [4] waiting, operating in a time distinct to our own, but nevertheless waiting, "always ready to be there" [5].

The change of the impersonal space (I do not see it in my own terms) into the personal space (so easily knowable, show me how) is observed through time; a slowing of pace and the still image can be consumed. As the pace slows, and distance is reduced, I am at the point of pause/delay, the flash of an image to the side; a reflexive marking engages my body. I see now through the spaces of the trees, the spot of sunlight reflected back to me, the potential space for my memories to reside. I become taken with the idea of drowning in an image, in my “quest for hallucination” [6].


[1] Zummer uses Times Square as an example of this formation of media, with its wrap around digital signage, flashing advertising walls and neon signs.
[2] Thomas Zummer; Variables: Notations on Stability, Permeability and Plurality in Media Artifacts, in Saving The Image Art After Film, ed. Tanya Leighton and Pavel Bucher, Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, 2003.
[3] The frame can be the borders of a physical space, the rectangular containment of a cinema screen, the frame of a photograph, the exact physical dimensions of a picture, and of course a discourse frame giving the permissions, standards and context to an idea existing in the world.
[4] Roland Barthes, and discussed in the Bruise of Time chapter.
[5] Zummer 239
[6] Barthes, the cinema as consent of illusion, the photograph as quest for hallucination.

June 2008 Images

Image post - The Grotto

A conversation regarding this image

N:
as if you were flying when you took this
i do not like the title.
cause i do not see the whatever "nothingness" in it.
its vibrant, luscious, in motion...the image in motion, my eyes sway.and for whatever feeling i am feeling it feels like nature symbolizing the digital age....????
i think you should do more of this.....

M:
the nothingness is the antithisis of this picture. the opposite, this image is the everything. its movement, colour, light, shape, it is tone and form, it buries us, overwhelms us.
It transmits, like a virus, all the feeling, and all the knowledge of a moment in time, staring, falling,
But never still, but always contained.

New work 2007

Some new images from Nov 2007

A pictorial reflection on Henri Bergson Matter and Memory

Matter thus resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and travelling in every direction like shivers through an immense body.- Henri Bergson Matter and Memory

Image from The Grotto October 2007 (I have my new Mamiya!)

And her hair creeps over her shoulders like foliage...

reflection on: A History of Colours, Manilo Brusatin

This is beautiful:

Sounds reveal a passage of time, an intensity, a timbre; colours a darkness, a clarity, a tone. Timbres and tones may possibly bear a resemblance to each other, but beyond these, sounds seem to fly away (reverberate) into the dimension of space, which contains them, whereas colours move through the dimension of time, which keeps or consumes them. We are pushed toward the colours of our memories as towards the resonances of places we have known. - A History of Colours, Manilo Brusatin


This is kind of exactly what my entire practice is about. Colour, Light, Memory, and the psychology of these tones' physicality, the knowledge of their appearance and their use as mnemonic devices.

Its like pathology, and photography captures it so well. The drama of space that contains them, propels them, and the bodies that feel their pulse and perceive them. Its so quiet, so slow, so elongated, the feeling of describing them bloom of light/colour in the mind or on the body of a person. Like a memory or scar. A secret.

Apparitions at twilight
Night storms, darkness, hidden existence. An electric clap and the hidden is made visible. A drama of space between the negative and the positive, light and dark. Knowable forms give way to blooming apparitions. We see a change, a shift, an uncomfortable awakening. For a moment I must recognise: what I hear, see, and feel; this forms what I know. These are the senses that make me, and my knowledge of this space. Then, seen slightly, as if in a dream state, a flash, the sky opens, a temporary emergence of the hidden, an illumination in the half-light. In a quickening of optical impulses I see the leaves, the tree. Then it is gone. The photograph slows the apparition. An eternal moment.


“In either case, what is seen fills the field of vision, but the field of vision is never taken as all there is to see.”- Marilyn Strathern After Nature


I am thinking about here, to borrow a term from Walter Benjamin, the body as darkroom. The body itself as a house of images. Light impressions pressed into the skin, literally burnt on our bodies. A participation in an organic process. The water creates rivulets on her back, her hair is like a foliage creeping over, moving towards the light. Outside, in the darkness, light floods through branches. There is a slow awakening, a blooming as the trees take their shape, other organic apparitions. Once before the trees were hidden from themselves, or hidden from my own self. I am seared through with light. Becoming an apparition.


I am experimenting with photographing as I walk, as I interact. The photographic act is integral, the camera is my third eye, it uncovers what I can not see alone. There are twilight forces; storms, the sea, wind, lights, and also, apparitions of the day. Full sunlight, shimmering iridescence, blindness by light. I am reading Words of Light I am reading Fear of Freedom, I am reading Invisible Cities and Warped Space. I recognise that my images are informed by the junction, or in some ways, collision of the natural organic world, and the constructed human world. In images such as the above I want to have an absence of the perceptible (the street) but recognise that the natural is still bound to the constructed world it pushes against. The hidden world exists in the one I live within. It is not a metaphoric or idealised natural landscape or the country-side where nature exists as intended. It does exist both outside of me and inside of me. It is my physiology. It is nature slipping between and beneath buildings. It is oil slick. It is the water parting over concrete, it is a body and a skin, existing on the edge between sight and touch, measured in the time a word is spoken, a memory recalled, a flash of lightning, a sunburn to form.


Transformations of the landscape affect the definition of the subject regarding them. I am interested in the meteorological nature of my work. A leaf falls against a gutter, clinging for a moment before being swept along.


I think of the work of Bill Viola - Departing Angel and The Reflective Pool. My own physiology dwells in contrast to the immediate constant flow of water, and its ebbs and cycles. I am still, and a participant only in stages. I wonder about wandering in a fog, and how different things would seem there. Known things, a road, a sign, a path, a puddle. I think about technology, how I could know all things, maybe. I could know everything, but I know nothing. I comprehend cyberspace but barely know my own geography. I am a stranger in the dark. The tree resembles a human limb, my limb, my phantom limb.


My Ghost

Images

The images untitled8-2006 and untitled9-2006 are part of an untitled projection series that was shown on built surfaces. This series explores the dialogue between internal and external emotional states and physical spaces. The hidden interior of human thought is contrasted with the x-ray image of a breast, symbolising the ‘bloom’ as referred to in another image. The internal secret bloom is then projected externally, impersonally, for all to see. The two images speak of both physical and emotional darkness.